Empty system prompt shouldn't be rejected.

[buczek]

Currently, the webgui requires a system prompt and shows the error ("System prompt is required") if you try to set it to empty ¹. However recommendation for Deepseek is to have an empty system prompt ². I suggest the validation to be removed.

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/gwdg/chat-ai/blob/3cec71999bfc5f1961e1f0d78c4d86d24ec7f942/front/src/components/Chat/SettingsPanel.jsx#L160] ↩

2. https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1/blob/main/README.md#usage-recommendations ↩

[adoosth]

Thanks, this is a valid point, but for some other models you can get a bad request error if you send a message without a system prompt.

Perhaps having a warning message (e.g. Warning: the system prompt is empty) instead of outright rejecting it would be better; if the user gets a bad request error they will probably understand why.

[buczek]

Perhaps failures caused by model specific requirements which currently return "bad request" can be turned into a more sensible error message ("This model requires a non-empty system message")? Model specific validation of input should not be done in the GUI frontend, but further down the pipeline, though.

Instead of validation, the system prompt could also be defaulted to an empty string when absent for those models which require it. Personally, I'd prefer a validation over a fixup, because it keeps the user informed and doesn't do magic behind the scenes.